Rain rain go away!

We turned up at the station at about 9:20 and an hour and forty minutes later the train turned up! Fortunately Zagreb isn’t the largest of cities to visit and we easily walked around all the main sights in the afternoon. You can see a grand city struggling to get out in the centre with little evidence of the horrid communist concrete monstrosities. A number of the older buildings plaster is falling off and in some empty shop windows, signs in English, just small enough to make you wander over to have a look at them warn you of the danger of falling tiles!

But many of the buildings have been renovated beautifully and many more are surrounded in canvas being done up. Like LJubliana, Zagreb will be a majestic city in a few years time.

We eventually spent 5 nights at our campsite near Karlovac. We met a Welsh couple who we got on with really well despite their Welshness and spent too much time in the bar!

We moved on to the Plitvice National Park to see the waterfalls and generally be fleeced by the Croatian tourist industry. Parking £9 entry £15 each and a bottle of fanta £2 a bit like being back in the UK. The park itself was amazing with hundreds of waterfalls and it seemed the entire school population of a small country being eagerly followed around by hordes of Japanese tourists taking photos of everything. We always thought we took a lot of pictures but I am sure some of the tourists had their cameras super glued to their heads. It was one do the few days when we had some sun and with the waterfalls creating rainbows and the unusual colours of the lakes and greenery it was a great day.

We left the lakes and drove south to Split after a night of torrential rain. Tents had been moved into the toilet blocks and Noah would have been hurriedly rounding up animals had he been there it really was almost biblical.

The road runs near the border with Bosnia and we passed many abandoned houses with no roofs and nature gradually reclaiming the land. It was quite strange.

We arrived at Split and managed to park up virtually with our van on the beach, got out of Taffy And who should be standing behind the van than our stalkers the welsh couple! So another evening in the bar whilst the North sea crashed along the shore and the arctic wind blew steel grey clouds across the sky hurriedly until it could find one full of rain to empty on us.

The next morning the camp site was a wash and the coastal road past fields and campsites invisible under a grey blanket of water. We even went through towns where the fire brigade were pumping building out.

The sun peaked out just as we past Dubrovnik presumably so we could see the flooding more clearly before vanishing again behind the advancing March of more ominous black clouds. Come to sunny Croatia it says on the tourist literature – we’d love too if we knew where it was!

We are now holed up like Scott of the Antarctic just north of the Montenegro border overlooking a bay that looks more like Rockall in December than the Adriatic, its cold windy and just stopped raining – but only to allow it to hail instead. “I’m going outside I may be some time”

PS. When I spell checked this it tried to replace Adriatic with sadistic.